Valve Sued by Immersion over Steam Deck and Index Rumble
theverge.com
theverge.com
Unless these patents will be invalidated, this company will be able to sue any other company for 27 whole years for "thing vibrates when you touch it", "thing vibrates based on what's on the screen", "thing vibrates when you touch if (but with an algorithm somewhere)", "thing vibrates when something happens", "thing vibrates when you move your finger", or "thing vibrates when you push".
This is legal extortion.
1. A computer-readable medium having instructions, the instructions including instructions that cause a processor to:
detect a first pressure on a first input device;
provide a first tactile sensation to the first input device, the first tactile sensation based at least in part on the first pressure;
[...][0]
In general any patent that doesn't help the reader recreate the invention should not be valid. They should be more like instruction manuals "describing the said invention or discovery, clearly, truly and fully,"[1] rather than a list of vague ideas.
[0]https://patents.google.com/patent/US7336260B2
[1]https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Lar...
This discourages competition from smaller outlets, and thus allows the big players fewer competitors. Though, again, pure speculation on my part.
And importantly, they don't want their own patents invalidated. They don't want legal precedents that weaken their own IP rights.
Nothing's different: https://ir.immersion.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...
You can only patent actual inventions, not ideas. So you can't just patent "touch screens which feel like a physical keyboard", but how your specific implementation of that works.
Don't mix theory and reality.
It’s one of those games where dying takes you way, way back. When the game is well balanced, I don’t mind, but this one is pretty easy as you go along and then the boss is so much more difficult than anything before. So you die and start over and do it again and again. But because the initial part of the game is pretty easy, you don’t really get much better in the lead up to the first boss.
Normally developers include accessibility controls to make the game enjoyable for everybody, but the Returnal developers didn’t. They want you to play their way, or not at all. I ended up choosing the latter. They got my money though, so I suppose in the end, they won.
While Valve’s hardware uses a different form of rumble than the ones that Sony and co. got sued for back in the day — linear resonant actuators (LRA), rather than an eccentrically swinging weight on a shaft — that didn’t stop Nintendo from signing an agreement with Immersion to bring its technology to the Switch, which uses LRAs as well. So does Sony’s DualSense, for that matter.
immersion didn't invent LRAs. their claim is that the use of LRAs vs swinging weights is irrelevant; that any vibration haptics via any means would constitute a patent infringement.
ex. 1: Global game jam game where one player has to only use rumble to achieve thier goal, the dev then went to make games for blind people, and rumble is still very much part of them. It definitely feels gimmicky but it kinda opened my eye to the fact that people perceive different parts of games in different ways, depending on their disabilities
ex 2: in Beat saber, rumble tells you when your controller hits something, it becomes such an important part of the experience that when my index controllers lost rumble I had to quit playing. Without being able to watch everywhere at all times, the haptic feedback becomes vital to knowing if you hit that note you were aiming for while focusing elsewhere.